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How
The Roots Of The ‘PayPal Mafia’ Extend To Apartheid South Africa
Elon Musk grew
up with the privileges of a stratified racial order and Peter Thiel
lived in a city that venerated Hitler.
When Elon
Musk’s arm shot out in a stiff arm salute at Donald Trump’s
inaugural celebrations, startled viewers mostly drew the obvious
comparison.
But in the
fired-up debate about Musk’s intent that followed, as the world’s
richest man insisted he wasn’t trying to be a Nazi, speculation
inevitably focused on whether his roots in apartheid-era South Africa
offered an insight.
In recent
months Musk’s promotion of far-right conspiracy theories has grown,
from a deepening hostility to democratic institutions to the recent
endorsement of Germany’s far-right Alternative für Deutschland
(AfD). He has taken an unhealthy interest in genetics while backing
claims of a looming “white genocide” in his South African
homeland and endorsing posts promoting the racist “great
replacement” conspiracy theory. Increasingly, his language and tone
have come to echo the old South Africa.
He is not
alone. Musk is part of the “PayPal mafia” of libertarian
billionaires with roots in South Africa under white rule now hugely
influential in the US tech industry and politics.
They include
Peter Thiel, the German-born billionaire venture capitalist and
PayPal cofounder, who was educated in a southern African city in the
1970s where Hitler was still openly venerated. Thiel, a major donor
to Trump’s campaign, has been critical of welfare programs and
women being permitted to vote as undermining capitalism. A 2021
biography of Thiel, called The Contrarian, alleged that as a student
at Stanford he defended apartheid as “economically sound”.
David Sacks,
formerly PayPal’s chief operating officer and now a leading
fundraiser for Trump, was born in Cape Town and grew up within the
South African diaspora after his family moved to the US when he was
young. A fourth member of the mafia, Roelof Botha, the grandson of
the apartheid regime’s last foreign minister, Pik Botha, and former
PayPal CFO, has kept a lower political profile but remains close to
Musk.
Among them,
Musk stands out for his ownership of X, which is increasingly a
platform for far-right views, and his proximity to Trump, who has
nominated Musk to head a “department of government efficiency” to
slash and burn its way through the federal bureaucracy.
Some draw a
straight line between Musk’s formative years atop a complex system
of racial hierarchy as a white male, in a country increasingly at war
with itself as the South African government became ever more
repressive as resistance to apartheid grew, and the man we see at
Trump’s side today.
The week before
the inauguration, Steve Bannon, Trump’s former adviser, described
white South Africans as the “most racist people on earth”,
questioned their involvement in US politics and said Musk was a
malign influence who should go back to the country of his birth.
Others are
sceptical that Musk’s increasingly extreme views can be tracked
back to his upbringing in Pretoria. The acclaimed South African
writer Jonny Steinberg recently called attempts to explain Musk
through his childhood under apartheid “a bad idea” that resulted
in “facile” conclusions.
But for those
looking to join dots, there is fodder from Musk’s early life with a
neo-Nazi grandfather who moved from Canada to South Africa because he
liked the idea of apartheid through his high school education in a
system infused with the ideology of white supremacy.
Musk’s
formative years in the 1980s came amid a cauldron of rebellion in the
Black townships which drew a state of emergency and a bloody
crackdown by the state. Some whites fled the country. Others marched
with the neo-Nazi Afrikaner Resistance Movement against any weakening
of apartheid.
The South
Africa into which Musk was born in 1971, and to which Thiel moved as
a child from Germany, was led by a prime minister, John Vorster, who
had been a general in a fascist militia three decades earlier that
allied itself with Hitler.
The
Ossewabrandwag (OB) was founded shortly before the second world war.
It opposed South Africa entering the war as an ally of Britain and
plotted with German military intelligence to assassinate the prime
minster, Jan Smuts, as a prelude to an armed uprising in support of
Hitler.
Vorster made no
secret of his sympathy for Nazi, or National Socialist, ideology
which he compared to the Afrikaner political philosophy of Christian
nationalism.
“We stand for
Christian nationalism which is an ally of National Socialism,” he
said in 1942. “You can call this anti-democratic principle
dictatorship if you wish. In Italy it is called ‘Fascism’, in
Germany ‘German National Socialism’ and in South Africa
‘Christian nationalism’.”
Smuts’s
government took a dim view of that and a few weeks later interned
Vorster as a Nazi sympathiser.
At the end of
the war, the OB was absorbed into the National party, which then won
the 1948 election, in which Black South Africans had no vote, on a
commitment to impose apartheid. In 1961, Vorster joined the
government as minister of justice and five years later became prime
minister.
Nazism may have
been defeated in Europe but Christian nationalism was alive and
kicking in South Africa under Vorster, with its own brand of racial
classification and stratification justified by the need to keep the
“swart gevaar”, or black danger, at bay.
In schools,
Christian nationalist education sought to forge a South African
identity around a singular version of the country’s history. Musk
and Thiel were taught that the Afrikaner, mostly the descendants of
Dutch colonisers, was the real victim of South Africa’s strife
whether at the hands of grasping British imperialists or treacherous
Zulu chiefs.
The truth
is we didn’t see Black people quite as equals. We didn’t think
about it
Phillip Van
Niekerk
Bea Roberts,
who grew up in an apartheid-supporting family but came to oppose the
system and later worked for the Institute for a Democratic South
Africa, remembers a heavy emphasis on Afrikaners as victims pursuing
apartheid in order to protect their culture and even their very
existence.
“It was a
strange mix of ‘we got fucked up by the British in the [second
Boer] war, and our women and children died in thousands in the
concentration camps’ so we are going to rebuild our nation and make
sure that that we are invincible. And we’ll do that by extreme
means,” she said.
Schooling, like
much else, was segregated by race for most of the apartheid era and,
on paper at least, white pupils across South Africa were subject to
the same Christian nationalist education. But white society was
itself divided and the historical narrative embraced in
Afrikaans-speaking schools could often became the basis for an
implicit rejection of apartheid philosophy in English-speaking ones.
Musk attended a
Johannesburg high school and then the Pretoria boys high school, an
institution whose other alumni include students who went on to become
leading anti-apartheid activists such as Edwin Cameron, a South
African supreme court justice after the collapse of white rule, and
Peter Hain, who moved to Britain, where he became a leading
campaigner against apartheid and then a Labour government minister.
Phillip Van
Niekerk, former editor of the leading anti-apartheid Mail and
Guardian newspaper in Johannesburg, had Afrikaner parents but
attended an English-speaking school. He recalled that the official
version of history did little to engender support for the apartheid
system among a lot of English speakers even if they benefited from it
and did little to challenge it.
“We hated the
National party government. Even our teachers were kind of hostile. It
was seen almost like an imposition. Yet you imbibe things through the
culture. The truth is we didn’t see Black people quite as equals.
We didn’t think about it,” he said.
Thiel got all
that and more at schools in South Africa and its de facto colony,
South West Africa, which became independent as Namibia in 1990.
South West
Africa had been a German colony until the end of the first world war
and Thiel lived for a time in the city of Swakopmund, where he
attended a German-language school while his father worked at a nearby
uranium mine.
At that time,
Swakopmund was notorious for its continued glorification of Nazism,
including celebrating Hitler’s birthday. In 1976, the New York
Times reported that some people in the town continued to greet each
other with “Heil Hitler” and to give the Nazi salute.
Van Niekerk
visited Swakopmund during South African rule.
“I was there
in the 1980s and you could walk into a curio shop and buy mugs with
Nazi swastikas on them. If you’re German and you’re in Swakopmund
in the 1970s, which is when Thiel was there, you’re part of that
community,” he said.
Thiel, who
moved to the US when he was 10, has described his schooling in
Swakopmund as instilling a dislike of regimentation that steered him
towards libertarianism.
Thiel’s
father worked at a uranium mine in Rössing where, as in the gold and
coalmines of the Reef around Johannesburg, Black laborers were paid
just enough to survive, living conditions were dire and the work
dangerous. White managers, on the other hand, lived a lifestyle of
neo-colonial luxury with servants at the ready.
Musk’s
father, Errol, was also in the mining business among other interests.
He once boasted that his stake in Zambian emerald mines made him “so
much money we couldn’t even close our safe”. Musk’s mother,
Maye, has said the family owned two homes, a plane, a yacht and a
handful of luxury cars.
Errol Musk has
said that he opposed apartheid and joined the Progressive Federal
party but then left because he didn’t like its demand for one
person, one vote, and instead favored a more gradual reform with
separate parliaments for different races. That was the liberal
position inside the Musk family.
Musk’s
maternal grandfather, Joshua Haldeman, moved from Canada to South
Africa in 1950 because he liked the newly elected apartheid
government.
In the 1930s,
Haldeman was the Canadian leader of a fringe political movement
originating in the US, Technocracy Incorporated, that advocated
abolishing democracy in favor of government by elite technicians but
which took on overtones of fascism with its uniforms and salutes.
The Canadian
government banned Technocracy Incorporated during the second world
war as a threat to the country’s security in part for its
opposition to fighting Hitler. Haldeman was charged with publishing
documents opposing the war and sent to prison for two months.
After the war,
Haldeman led a separate political party that among other things
promoted the antisemitic forgery the Protocols of the Elders of Zion.
When that went nowhere, he moved to South Africa because he said he
liked the core National party philosophy of Christian nationalism
that Vorster likened to Nazism.
Errol Musk
described Maye’s parents as so extreme he stopped visiting them.
We white
South Africans, by the very nature of our privileges and our place in
the racial hierarchy, grew up believing we were the master race
Phillip Van
Niekerk
“They were
very fanatical in favor of apartheid,” he told Podcast and Chill.
“Her parents came to South Africa from Canada because they
sympathised with the Afrikaner government. They used to support
Hitler and all that sort of stuff.”
Haldeman was
killed in a plane crash when Elon was three years old but the boy
remained close to his grandmother and mother. He is estranged from
his father, whom Maye has described as abusive of her and their
children. Errol Musk once claimed to have shot and killed three
people who broke into his house.
Musk has
described his father as a “terrible human being”.
“Almost every
evil thing you could possibly think of, he has done,” he told
Rolling Stone without elaborating in 2017.
What is
indisputable is that Musk and Thiel grew up amid incredible privilege
where the racial hierarchy was clear. Those who claimed to reject
apartheid sought to explain this privilege not as the result of
systemic racial oppression but the natural order of things thanks to
their own abilities. That in turn led some to regard all forms
government as oppressive and true liberty as an individual battle for
survival.
The biography
of Thiel said he held a view common among apartheid’s supporters at
the time that Black South Africans were better off than Africans in
other parts of the continent even if they were systematically denied
their rights. Thiel has denied ever having supported apartheid.
Van Niekerk
said that opposition to apartheid did not necessarily mean rejection
of white supremacy or privilege, a point made in a 1968 British
television documentary the year before Thiel was born.
The commentary
observed that the English-speaking mining barons and other
industrialists in Johannesburg usually claimed to be “hostile to
apartheid, call themselves liberal” but did little to oppose the
system while profiting from it.
Helen Suzman,
at the time a member of the South African parliament who was often a
lone voice in opposition to apartheid, was critical of these powerful
industrialists and businessmen, saying “people who do nothing are
responsible”. She accused them of hiding behind apartheid to
exploit Black workers.
“I see no
reason why the industrialists should not improve the living
conditions of their workers,” she said.
In the
documentary, Stanley Cohen, the managing director of the OK Bazaars
supermarket chain owned by his family, was asked why he only employed
whites behind the counter and no South Africans of other races even
though many of the customers were Black. Cohen acknowledged that it
was not a legal requirement, but did it to indulge the racist
prejudices of white customers.
“There is no
reason why they [Black people] can’t work behind the counters.
There’s no law against it. But there is this natural prejudice in
this country which you can’t legislate for or against,” he said.
A decade later,
power was shifting. The uprising that began in Soweto in 1976 had
become a full-blown national crisis for the apartheid system by the
1980s. A low-level civil war was under way. In response, the state
grew even more violent and repressive. White paranoia was fed by the
creep of independent Black African states under Marxist-leaning
governments ever closer to South Africa’s borders, with Angola and
Mozambique in the 1970s followed by Zimbabwe in 1980.
Talk of white
genocide emerged, a conspiracy theory that has taken on new life in
recent times with the killings of white farmers in South Africa and
Zimbabwe. Support surged for the neo-Nazi Afrikaner
Weerstandsbeweging (AWB), or Afrikaner Resistance Movement, founded
in the early 1970s to oppose any relaxation of apartheid.
The AWB,
founded by Eugene Terre’Blanche, an imposing and flamboyant figure
given to riding around on a horse from which he occasionally fell
off, made no secret of its model with a badge strikingly similar to a
swastika in design and colors. It’s supporters were also fond of
the stiff-armed Hitler salute as they paraded on the streets of
Pretoria. At its peak, the AWB appeared to have the support of more
than 10% of white South Africans.
Roberts said
life for privileged whites in particular was “definitely a bubble,
and one filled with self-belief”. But she said that it became
increasingly difficult to ignore reality.
“I think Musk
in Pretoria in the 1980s must have had a sense of what Black people
were experiencing and why they were angry. I grew up fairly
conservative but I was able to change my views. I think you have to
be fairly rigid in the 80s to still cling on to the belief that the
apartheid system was fine and correct and in everybody’s best
interest,” she said.
Musk left South
Africa in 1988 in the midst of this ferment, two years before FW de
Klerk carved out a path to freedom by releasing Nelson Mandela. Had
he stayed, Musk faced being conscripted into the military for two
years, an obligatory service for white men, that could well have
meant fighting in the “border war” in Angola and Namibia or being
sent to put down Black protests in the townships.
Instead, Musk
took Canadian citizenship through his mother and moved to Ontario.
Van Niekerk said that, whether he wants to admit it or not, Musk also
took a part of South Africa with him.
“We all
[white South Africans], by the very nature of our privileges and our
place in the racial hierarchy, grew up believing we were the master
race, even if we didn’t actively think about it,” he said.
